Ginger Without Borders

At work, I go through a disturbing amount of articles every day picking out the most relevant ones to tweet from our company accounts. And because my personal twitter is absolutely abysmal follower and activity-wise, I’ve been using the less company-relevant (but still thought provoking) articles for myself. Recently one came across my desk that started my own personal mini-rant about the UN (because that’s what I do) but instead of making like…10 tweets about it, I decided to make a blog post instead.

The article: “Some countries are expected to miss UN targets on hunger and equal pay.” – UAE Public Policy Forum, https://bit.ly/2H0HNzE.

Yes, agreed, it is undesirable that the world will not achieve all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 – but it was expected. 

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were not completely achieved by their deadline in 2015. But there was still so much success towards their achievement that the SDGs were created as a successor, and the SDGs included many goals the MDGs had failed to achieve.

Goals are not goals if they are easy to achieve. As J.Cole puts it [and I have totally quoted this at the UN, a moment which I am way too proud about], ‘If you ain’t aim to high, then you aim too low’. #NorthCarolinaRepresent

Many SDGs require completely reshaping national policies. It would be unrealistic to expect such lofty goals to be fully achieve in only 15 years. More likely, those not achieved will be incorporated into a new set of goals.

And on it will continue – the world will make a set of goals, work together to achieve them, hold a disturbing number of meetings talking about all the work to try to achieve them, and ultimately incorporate those that aren’t achieved into a new set of goals with a new set of deadlines.

It also is a learning process – if we aren’t achieving these goals one way, maybe there is another way we can approach (or rephrase) them to make it more realistic/easy for us to achieve.

The inability to achieve any of the SDGs – or any of the MDGs for that matter – was not a sign of failure but rather a sign that the world needs to work harder and approach those goals differently in order to achieve them.

All this said – the world should still work diligently (and realistically) towards achieving as many of the SDGs as possible to provide a better future for our next generations. #RantOver